Barak reflects on loss of Arab and Labor support after 2001 election

/ BARAK / 104 I did regret being unable to rely on the support of two key constituencies that had helped deliver my landslide victory barely 18 months earlier: my own Labor Party and the Arab citizens of Israel. I had no trouble understanding the reasons many Israeli Arabs were abandoning me. The clashes in the Galilee at the start of the new intifada had left more than a dozen of their community dead. As an official inquiry would later conclude, there was blame on all sides. A number of Arab members of the Knesset had played a part in inciting the violence. Yet the police had been unprepared, and they had used excessive force. As I said publicly before the election, I, as Prime Minister, was ultimately responsible, and I formally apologized for what had happened. Yet the roots went deeper, to the economic and social disadvantages still faced by many Arab citizens, and the difficulty in resolving those problems calmly and collectively as long as Israel remained in a state of war with its Arab neighbors. For Labor and the political left, it was as if, despite Arafat’s repeated rejections of ever more forthcoming terms of peace, they still couldn’t bring themselves to believe he really meant it. By default, they were inclined to blame me for not delivering peace. I was accused of relying too much on a close circle of aides and negotiators I’d known from my time in the army, of not giving a negotiating role to Labor veterans of the Oslo negotiations like Yossi Beilin, and of being insufficiently sensitive to Arafat’s needs in the negotiating process. Typical of the argument was a broadside by the journalist and historian Tom Segev, in Haaretz, which accused me of an “incredible arrogance” which had “led to an historic mistake. Rather than continue on the Oslo road, Barak put it into his head that he could reach a final settlement and try and impose it on the Palestinian Authority President.” I did not try to “impose” anything on Arafat. I did, quite consciously, abandon the “Oslo road” because it was inexorably leading to a situation where, after the final Wye redeployments, Arafat would have control over the great majority of the West Bank without having to commit to any of the assurances that even most on the Israeli left would define as the minimum required for peace. Now, of course, we knew that was something the Palestinian leader was not prepared to do. When election day came, not that many of my critics on the left actually voted against me. Nor did the Israeli Arabs. Yet in very large numbers, they simply didn’t vote. In percentage terms, Arik’s victory was even more decisive than mine over Bibi. He got more than 62 percent of the vote. I received barely 37 percent. 390 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_028238